This is half-baked, not set in stone, but a sort of what-I'm-musing-right-now on the matter of creation and evolution. Informed by years of listening to the cacophany of different voices, and fundamentalists on all sides.

Let me start by saying that Very Old Earth is a given for me. No debate possible. However, I have a bit more difficulty with the biological micro-to-macro-evolution side of things, the "lots of small changes and mumble-mumble and voilà man!" (For the mathematically inclined, the equation above is a wry summary of what that looks like to me).

But the rest of this post is not about the science, it's about what the Bible story can still mean if we take evolution as a given.

This may shock some, but if I'm totally honest, intellectually speaking the simplest answer (per Occam's razor) is that the Bible account is just a fable, so there's nothing to reconcile. Nothing to see here, move along please.

But in a whack-a-mole kind of way, eviscerating the origins story of any meaning (or even evacuating the question of meaning as being meaningful, as seems to be the approach of some neo-atheists) just brings up different cans of worms in other domains - philosophical and theological, and by extension existential (which is fine by the fundamentalist scientists: because if you can't count it, it doesn't exist).

Which is why I'm still gnawing on this bone.

This is not THE answer, it is an intuition about where the answer might be

If biology evolved (we're taking this as a given), then our first big problem is that suffering and death were not a result of the fall. This implies that somehow suffering was inevitable (or that God thinks it's not inherently 'bad').

Proto-man would have been the first self aware 'ape'. Maybe this is something that resulted from an encounter with God: This would be the meaning of "formed from the earth" combined with "breath of God" and "in God's image".

Perhaps one could say that whatever man was before this, pain and suffering were already present but not experienced existentially. As in the animal world. Animals (sorry if this triggers the anti-specists) experience pain and suffering when it happens, but they don't have an existential dread of non-being.

The knowledge of good and evil was thus not a change of behaviour, but a new understanding of 'animal behaviour' as inadequate.

Man was (and still is) called into "anti-evolution": nurture of the weakest rather than survival of the fittest is God's will for mankind. "Red in tooth and claw" was good for nature, but was no longer good for man.

Adam and Eve could be an archetype, maybe it happened in different places independently?

Maybe God wants the whole planet to come out of the evolutionary process, through mankind? This could be the tending of the garden.

One of the intriguing things about this hypothesis is that His-story is no longer about returning to Eden, to a mythical former state of grace (similarly to how psychologists say we long to be back in the safety of our mother's womb), but a progression towards full humanity, which involves discovering/learning what humanity even means.

As you can see, more work is required! What does the say for the "fall"? Do we still "need" a serpent/devil? Is evil actually a thing, or just an absence of something? What is salvation, in this vision? For example, if sin is a refusal of our 'humanity', and a return to pure animality, is eternal death not just the same as animal death?

Friday, November 25, 2016

There was a potent sound-bite in the Brexit campaign, about people having had enough of experts.

The experts and their acolytes are still choking on that one :)

But I've been thinking about this recently, because on the question of electricity generation, I rather am for listening to the experts (as you'll have gathered from yesterday's post, if you bothered to trawl through it).

So I was happy to come across this comment, where someone has expressed what I hadn't quite got around to thinking:

So… nobody who actually knows anything about, say, energy or industry
or economics thinks it’s a good idea to carpet Britain with expensive,
unreliable windfarms. But the ‘experts’ do.

Nobody in real life thinks it’s a good idea to replace the English
with Somalis, Syrians and Sudanese. But The Economist says it’ll boost
GDP by 1% and The Guardian says having our own country is racist so the
‘experts’ do.

Nobody who owns a map and remembered the Iraq war thought it was a
good idea to attack Libya and turn it over to Islamic fanatics. But hey –
‘experts’!

The rest of the comment is worth a read, but slightly less politically correct, so you can click through if you're not going to be offended by further abuse of experts and their followers.

"There is a visible horizon with Jesus, because there are things I can understand and affirm in the creeds and confessions. But there is no actual horizon. His love, grace and majesty are never ending. My theology is a map, not a photograph. A sail, not an anchor. Faith is a mystery, not a certainty, because I can never be certain that my mind has captured more than a glimpse of his glory. A hope, not a possession, because nothing I possess can hold the one who holds me."

A little 'adventure' on the way back. I often come off the motorway to take a short-cut, and on the map have noticed an interesting looking lake. This time we went to have a look and ended up eating at a vaguely greasy-spoon-type place on the 'beach'. We forgot Rebecca's blood test kit there and they kindly posted it to us.

Continuing with our new exploration mode, we branched out and went North again to visit the Parc Amazonia. We brought Thomas along for the ride. Reviews on the internet were fairly polarised, so I didn't know what to expect.